alt Hacker News> No this isn't correct. It's not true that Sam Altman specifically owns most of the US and it's not true of any particular famous rich person either. What it would mean to "own most of the US" is pretty ill-defined, but I think there's no reasonable definition of "owns most of the US" such that any individual or "handful of people" would qualify.
I think you're falling for the STEM-oriented trap of seeing everything through an overly literal reductive lens. Yes, of course Altman and his ilk don't literally have a deed saying "50.0001% of the US" on it framed up on their wall.
But they control the ruling institutions - see the way they act in unison with the American regime, see them sitting alongside leaders of state at the G7 summit [0], see his colleague Musk being invited to purge the government with DOGE.
Power and ownership isn't always quite so clear, especially in increasingly authoritarian systems. As another example, think of Putin - officially he's just a simple government employee drawing a modest salary. But you might agree with me that there's a bit more than that under the surface.
However, even in a literalist reading, the trends are obvious and alarming: Twelve people own more of the world's wealth than the bottom 50% of the population (!). [1]
> I agree that the political question around immigration to the US or other western countries isn't directly related to how people should think about Sam Altman
And yet, the conversation almost immediately got deflected to immigration, because staying on topic - Altman's impunity - would've been an ideologically difficult fact to examine.
That is my point and the mechanism I think is worthy of further investigation.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/17/anthropic-amodei-google-hass...
[1] https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice...
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Even if they had no power at all, they'd still be forced to suck up to the authoritarian Trump regime. They have to, because he's petty and vindictive and they rationally don't want to be wrecked by a narcissistic authoritarian.
>However, even in a literalist reading, the trends are obvious and alarming: Twelve people own more of the world's wealth than the bottom 50% of the population (!).
This alone implies nothing. What matters is the floor. A world where there was almost no wealth disparity but everyone was poor would be awful, and a world where 5 people had 10 billion times more wealth than everyone else combined would be good if all those other people lived in amazing prosperity. And if you check the correlations on standard of living and wealth inequality, you'll see it not only implies it but to some degree implies the opposite. (Obviously, it is more complicated than that alone, and increasing the floor would at this time require raising taxes in a way that evens things out more.)
> However, even in a literalist reading, the trends are obvious and alarming: Twelve people own more of the world's wealth than the bottom 50% of the population (!). [1]
That is indeed alarmist, at least. If you define wealth in a really stupid way you can get to that statement, but it has to be a really stupid way.